It's hope that leaves us hopeless.

I touched on the idea of optimism vs. realism before. I'm torn with optimism though, because I hate it when people are pessimistic and give you the whole "oh it will probably all go wrong, so why should I bother?" routine.
I like being optimistic, I think fundamentally because at least if you're positive about something, its more likely to happen than if you're negative about it.

Unfortunately, however, this leads to the biggest problem of optimism: hope.

Hope is also, at heart, a good thing. But the problem is that even if almost everything that you were hoping for happens, eventually it will go wrong.
It's hope that England will win the World Cup that is going to make it so gutting when we are inevitably dumped out at the quarter final stage on penalties. If we had never had that hope, that small chance of victory, then we would never have to feel bad watching our team fail.

On a personal note running along the same lines, I have to start applying for a job soon. Having (pretty much) achieved a 2.1 from my degree now, I can begin contacting the working community of Southern England begging them to give me money in exchange for me writing some eloquent prose for them.
It's the hope that you will be the one whose CV is picked up, and the readers thinks "my god he's brilliant! How have we remained in business for so long without David on our team?"
Or similar.

And it is the crushing disappointment when we recieve the, perhaps slightly differently worded: "Thank you for your interest in this position, but it has instead been filled by someone better than you in every way".

I am completely used to being disappointed, like a lot of people, I suspect. And I suppose any success I have, in any aspect of life, will likely result in the disappointment of someone else, and I never feel bad about it. Also, any disappointment I feel, is from someone else's pleasure or success.
It's a depressing thought that anyone's happiness comes likely at the cost of the sadness of others, but I think it is fundamentally true.

Realism, then, seems the way forward. Back to the job metaphor, and it is definitely a metaphor, realism announces:
It would have been brilliant to have gotten that job, but there were always going to be better people who deserved it more, so don't worry yourself.

But still hope gets in the way, because you knew, you knew all a-fucking-long that it wasnt going to happen, and that eventually you would just feel worse for failing. The tiny grain of hope kept you stupid.